Shift, Stretch, Expand: Everyday Transformations explores the quiet and inconspicuous operations of everyday existence. In our comings and goings, within and around us, myriad things are in constant states of transformation: water, currency, expressions, alliances, surfaces, to name just a few. While passing through spaces, being still, and interacting with those familiar and strangers, we are amidst infinitude often hardly apparent changes occurring in each instance. However obvious or subtle, or at times even invisible these occurrences are, they give nuance to the ways in which we perceive reality. This exhibition presents artists who investigate these shifts.

In vastly different ways, the artists hone in on specific conditions of transformation, including points at which limits are questioned, thresholds are crossed, frames of reference are destabilized, and expectations are played with. Their works approach this topic from a variety of angles. For instance, in terms of the objects we are surrounded by and the information we intake, artists address subject-matter that ranges from the materiality of household objects to performative gestures in the media, speaking to a considerable dynamism in that which is often overlooked or seemingly unequivocal. In other pieces, artists approach the topic in their response to the particular space of MCASB Satellite @ Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara—a location of liminal passage and transient encounters. They delve into ways in which certain settings affect our identities, taking up concepts such as intimacy and anonymity.

Further, in considering the idiosyncrasies of this alternative and less predictable exhibition site, several artists simultaneously address notions of transformation in their very creative process. Working in areas such as a stairwell corner or the lobby, they traverse new territories of production and display, expanding their practices by experimenting with materials, scale, interaction, and presentation. The exhibition invites visitors throughout the interior and exterior spaces of Hotel Indigo to view and experience a wide range of multifaceted work by artists from our region.

FREE ADMISSION.

Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) exhibition and education programs are generously supported by Paseo Nuevo Shopping Center, the National Endowment for the Arts; Nordstrom; Towbes Foundation; Ann Jackson Family Foundation; Community Events & Festivals Grant Program using funds provided by the City of Santa Barbara in partnership with the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission; Mosher Foundation in honor of Barry Berkus, recommended by Dr. Bruce McFadden; High Tide Foundation, and contributions from our Board of Trustees and many generous individuals. MCASB Curator's Council is gratefully acknowledged for their support. Additional significant support is provided by The James Irvine Foundation; Getty Foundation; Hutton Parker Foundation; Williams-Corbett Foundation, and Santa Barbara Foundation.

Curated by art historian Peyton Skipwith and drawn entirely from the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, this selection of some 50 paintings, drawings, and sculptures presents an overview of British art from around 1890 through 1945. Essentially, the exhibition presents the story of modernism unique to England: the persistence of figuration even as the lessons from continental avant-garde practice were absorbed. Cubism, Surrealism, Suprematism, Expressionism, and Vorticism signaled a definitive rupture with the tradition of representational content as commonly understood and a decided move towards abstraction. Artists represented include three of the founders of the New English Art Club: Walter Sickert, Philip Wilson Steer, and Paul Maitland, who established an alternative exhibition space to the traditional spaces of the Royal Academy in the 1890s. Richly represented are those artists who attended the Slade School in the heady years right before World War I, including James Innes, Christopher Nevinson, Adrian Allinson, and Stanley Spencer. The show takes the visitor through the World Wars and the ultimate absorption of continental modernism in England with representative works by Wyndam Lewis, Paul Nash, John Tunnard, and Eileen Agar and concludes with the biomorphic abstractions of Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore.

Adjacent to the “British Art from Whistler to World War II” exhibition, is a series of dramatic World War II photographs by Sir Cecil Beaton (1904–1980). Best known for his iconic images of royalty and movie legends and multi-award winning designs for such films as “My Fair Lady,” Beaton created extraordinary photographs of Britain during World War II’s cataclysm. Already established in the 1930s as a major fashion, society and Hollywood photographer, Beaton was hired by the UK’s Ministry of Information at the war’s outset to persuasively reflect the hardships and spirit of the British nation during this legendary time of trial.

This installation in Davidson Gallery consists of 15 images belonging to Beaton’s “London’s Honourable Scars,” a portfolio that pictured the devastation and resilience of London during the Nazi Blitz of 1940–41. Capturing an era poetically summarized by Winston Churchill as Britain’s “finest hour” when Britain stood alone against the German onslaught, these riveting evocations of London’s destruction and persistence were given to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art by one of its former directors, Ala Story, in 1958. Among the earliest photographs to enter the Museum’s collection, they have seldom if ever been on view in such a concentrated group at SBMA, and provide a fascinating endpoint to the works from decades earlier seen in the accompanying galleries. They also offer a rare chance to experience a seldom-seen facet of the art and life of one of the 20th century’s most mythic photographers.